Not all artists
are very consistent. Sometimes their styles change. Sometimes
they are uninspired. Geniuses can have off days.

These obvious truths present problems for connoisseurs and collectors,
and the public, a fact often further confused by the fact that
most exhibitions and collections are limited. Are we to judge
an artist on his entire oeuvre, just the most famous masterpieces,
or what is conveniently available? Naturally, the more we have
to examine and study and restudy the more refined will be our
judgment. Unfortunately, few of us are so privileged as to be
intimately familiar with an artist's complete oeuvre, and then,
sometimes, such intimacy breeds fatigue and exhaustion.

Blockbuster retrospective exhibitions offer art-lovers the opportunity
to feast on a cornucopia of an artist's achievements and usually
offer all but a few experts many surprises that document the artist's
odyssey through the myriad shoals of style and subject. Sometimes,
however, such shows are a bit too academic and include minor or
fragmentary work that is not up to the artist's finest efforts.
Whether juvenalia or abandoned works or doodles, they can detract
from the public's appreciation. Such distractions are of no consequence
to many academics, of course, but are probably best left for "study"
collections.

While it is refreshing to remember that artists are human, curatorial
overkill can deaden the public's enthusiasm a bit, especially
when it is mingled with the best work. The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, for example, has many great treasures, but sometimes a
trip through some of its galleries causes one to wonder why some
works are on exhibition.

This January Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) is the subject
of two traveling exhibitions, one, a giant retrospective that
is being shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,
and the other, a small show at the Berry-Hill Gallery at 11 East
70th Street in Manhattan. In many ways, the latter, much smaller
exhibition, is far more interesting as it has many marvelous small
works that radically alter the general perception of the artist.

The
Berry-Hill Gallery Exhibition

This show includes more than
50 paintings and pastels and is the most important gallery exhibition
on Vuillard since a show at Wildenstein in New York in 1964.

The handsome catalogue includes an interview between Luc Bellier
and Guy Cogeval, the author of the catalogue raisoné on
Vuillard and the curator of the huge retrospective exhibition
now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In the
interview, conducted in August, 2002, Mr. Cogeval, who is the
director of The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, provides the following
commentary:

"Vuillard's painting remains deeply seductive. He played
along with that and he was not mocking us. He knew perfectly well
that his style was enchanting and pleasurable, that he was one
of painting's greatest 'technicians'; few paintings would have
known how to size a canvas the way he did. His painting went beyond
the arcane of Symbolist language. He sought it out and the encounter
was completely inevitable. It must be admitted that Vuillard above
all wanted to paint beautiful works - an idea which is browbeaten
nowadays in the name of 'painting as crime,' and other such nonsense
which enchants the semi-literate."

In her catalogue essay entitled "Searching the Means of Expression,"
Elizabeth Wynne Easton, curator of European painting and sculpture
at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and author of "The Intimate
Interiors of Edouard Vuillard," provides the following commentary:

"Although Vuillard's artistic output spans the widest range
of subject and media, from theater sets and large panels painted
in peinture &nbspà la colle [literally, painting
with glue], to lithographs, photographs and even designs for porcelain,
he is certainly best known for the small, sometimes even tiny,
easel paintings depicting his family and close friends. For a
little over ten years, from the early 1890s until the dawn of
the 20th Century, his art was among the most adventurous and ambitious
work of his age.Vuillard's best-known work was created in his
twenties, when he was a member of a group called the Nabis. Their
name, taken from the Hebrew word for prophet, revealed their desire
to be prophets of a new kind of art. The Nabis, whose most prominent
members, aside from Vuillard, were Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis,
Paul Sérusier, and Felix Vallaton took the art of Paul
Gauguin as an inspiration for a radically different kind of painting
that eschewed traditional approaches to objective reality, including
linear and aerial perspective, and embraced an altogether subjective
vision. His best known works demonstrate the power of the Nabi
aesthetic, in which color is freed from the constraints of academic
versimilitude, and where form and color have meaning quite independent
from the objects they describe."

Vuillard is best known for his highly patterned, lush interiors,
but this show clearly demonstrates that he was capable of fabulous
abstraction and that his matte painting technique was not solely
dependent on marvelous texture but also occasionally fine line.

One of the
most remarkable works in this show is "Les toits rouges (The
red roofs)," shown above. Unfortunately, the catalogue does
not indicate whether this was a damaged or unfinished work, a
study or a fragment. Nonetheless, it is very strong.

One tends
to conjure Vuillard's compositions as tight and not very dramatic.
"La Jacanette à l'Etang-la-ville," shown above,
is an exception and recalls some of the best work of Vlaminck.
It is quite startling.

Perhaps
the most beautiful work in this exhibition is "Deux femmes
dansant au bord de l'eau," an exquisite pastel, shown above,
that is reminiscent of the finest work of John Twachtman and Georges
Seurat. This is a stunning abstraction.

A bravura
work of great beauty, "Dans la loge," shown above, is
not included in the Berry-Hill show but is illustrated in the
catalogue, while another superb large oil that is quite bright
and bold is in the show but not in the catalogue. "Dans la
loge" is unusual for Vuillard in its hot palette and in the
beauty of its subject.

The
National Gallery of Art (Washington) Exhibition

Accompanied
by an impressive, weighty and very large catalogue with 463 color
plates and 95 black-and-white illustrations (available for only
$40 from the museum's website at http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/vuillardinfo.htm), the Vuillard
exhibition at the National Gallery of Art is formidable and contains
many of his best paintings of interiors, many of his large decorative
panels, many drawings and photographs, and many portraits.

The frontispiece of the catalogue is "Sacha Guitry in his
Dressing Room," a wonderful large pastel that Vuillard executed
around 1911-2 and which had been estimated to sell at Sotheby's
in New York May 13, 1998 for $300,000 to $400,000. It sold for
$607,500 including the buyer's premium (see The
City Review article in which it is illustrated at the top of
the article) and according to this exhibition's catalogue it is
owned by Sir Sean and Lady Connery.

Two fine Vuillards not included in this exhibition nor in the
catalogue are "Morning in the Garden at Vaucresson,"
a classically lush garden scene in the Catharine Lorrilard Wolfe
Collection and "Luncheon," a bequest of Mary Cushing
Fosburgh, both at the Metropolitan Museum (and illustrated in
The
City Review article on that museum's exhibition "Painters
in Paris: 1895-1950" that ran from March 8-December 8, 2000).

While the early interiors and decorative panels clearly establish
Vuillard as a fine artist, the many portraits he executed late
in his career are, with rare exception, only good.

The exhibition
does have a few gems somewhat comparable to those in the Bellier/Berry
Hill exhibition such as "Grandmother Michaud in Silhouette,"
shown above, and "Octagonal Self-Portrait," oil on board,
1890, 36 by 28 centimeters, private collection, shown below.

"Octagonal
Self-Portrait"

Another
fine small work is "Lady of Fashion, L'Élégante,"
shown below.

"In Vuillard's hands, this utterly banal scene is transformed
into a profound metaphysical inquiry. A young woman, no doubt
one of Madame Vuillard's clients, is opening a door. Her hat is
decked with flowers that seem to burst forth like red fireworks.
A mysteriously illuminated area forms a great tau in the
second room.Vuillard offers us a figure in a state of waiting,
or possibly of surprise. She seems gathered in on herself, a modern-day
Pandora who has opened the box that holds a gleaming, inexplicable
secret. For the Nabi artist, the passage from one room to the
other becomes a transport from reality toward mystery. With this
simple, unpretentious little painting, where someone quite ordinary
is about to witness a revelation, Vuillard has created a gem.

Another
small painting of the same period is "Self-Portrait with
Cane and Straw Hat," in the collection of William Kelly Simpson
of New York. The catalogue notes that "the citron yellow
of the straw hat standing out against the more muted shade of
the wallpaper behind is very effective, as is the jaunty angle
of the artist's cane. His highly stylized almost cartoonish features
express a new quiet composure, and his handsome red beard makes
him look more than ever like a Zouave. The artist, an elegant
young man, is off for a stroll in the sunny streets of Paris."

Another
strong work that employs silhouettes is "At the Divan Japonais,"
shown above. "This," the catalogue observed, "is
unmistakably the face of Yvette Guilbert, easily recognizable
by her nutcracker chin and sharp nose, raised imperiously above
the audience in the pit.Yvette Guilbert was one of the most celebrated
performers of her day, both witty and cultivated."

A work that
is very typical of Vuillard's style is "Interior (Marie Leaning
Over Her Work," in the collection of the Yale University
Art Gallery, bequest of Edith Malvina K. Wetmore. A detail of
it adorns the cover of the catalogue, which provides the following
commentary:

"The surface of this painting is especially lush. Rich colour
and sumptuous pattern are juxtaposed throughout, creating an effect
comparable to that of a patchwork quilt, at once discordant and
subtly harmonious. At the same time, the brushwork, with its dense
impasto and repeated use of scumbling, adds texture, giving the
painting a strongly tactile quality. The resulting play of pattern
and texture renders the spatial relationships all the more ambiguous.
Although the figure of Marie is a solid presence in the foreground,
the blue of her dress, the brown of her hair and the gray of her
apron are echoed through the composition, discreetly drawing the
background elements toward the foreground. Similarly the heavy
impasto that is used throughout, emphasizing the pictorial surface,
gives more weight and presence to objects that are further removed
from the viewer."

Vuillard's palette is usually rather muted but in some works he
was very bold and stark. "In the Lamplight," an oil
on canvas mounted on cradled pane that measures 37.5 by 45.5 centimeters,
for example, shown above, is a very strong work in which Vuillard
shifts perspective and uses silhouettes with hardly any modeling.
It was executed in 1892 and is in the collectionof the Musée
de l'Annonciade in Saint-Tropez.

"Interior
with Worktable, also known as The Suitor, is justifiably among
Vuillard's most famous paintings, for it is a work in which the
artist perfectly merges the intimate with the decorative to create
an image that is both visually and psychologically rich. With
its voluptuous use of pattern, flickering brushwork and distinctive
theme - women observed in feminine activities within a cloistered
interior space - it exemplifies Vuillard's increasingly sophisticated
approach to the domestic interior, while presaging tow of his
most exquisite large-scale decorative projects: the panels executed
for Thadée and Misia Natansonand for Dr. Henry Vasquez,
painted in 1895 and 1896 respectively. The man in the picture
is Kerr Xavier-Roussel who married Marie the year the painting
was executed. According to the catalogue, Vuillard was unhappy
with his friend Roussel's "numerous amorous adventures":
and encouraged him to "keep company" with his sister
Marie. "The two were, however, woefully ill-matched,"
the catalogue continued, adding that "Roussel, charming,
handsome and intellectual, had little in common with the rather
plain and diffident Marie, who was seven years his senior."

"The
Striped Blouse," oil on canvas, 65.7 by 58.7 centimeters,
1895, the National Gallery of Art Washington, Collection of Mr.
and Mrs. Paul Mellon

Perhaps
Vuillard's loveliest painting is "The Striped Blouse,"
that is in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon at the National
Gallery of Art. It is one of five panels that Vuillard did for
Thadée and Misia Natanson in 1895. The five panels are
of different sizes and formats and are executed in a stippled,
tapestry-like style. "The mood of the panels is languorous,
subdued and highly sensual," the catalogue noted.

"Misia
and Valloton at Villeneuve," oil on board, 72 by 53 centimeters,
1899, William Kelly Simpson Collection, New York.

Misia Natanson
was one of the great women at the turn of the century and appears
with Felix Valloton in Vuillard's "Misia and Valloton at
Villeneuve," collection of William Kelly Simpson, shown above,
a very fine work.

One of the
most striking and memorable works in the exhibition is "The
Nape of Misia's Neck." The catalogue maintains that Misia
was Vuillard's "great secret love" and provides the
following quotation from her memoirs:

"The echoes of this agitation (the Dreyfus affair) reached
me at Villeneuve, and I decided to leave for Paris earlier than
usual. Vuillard then said he wanted to take a last walk along
the banks of the Yonne, and we started at dusk. Looking dreamy
and grave, he led me beside the river amongst the tall birches
with their silvery trunks. He moved slowly over the yellowing
grass, and I fell in with his mood; we did not speak. The day
was closing in rapidly so we took a shortcut across a beetroot
field. Our silhouettes were insubstantial shadows against a pale
sky. The ground was rough, I tripped on a root and almost fell;
Vuillard stopped abruptly to help me regain my balance. Our eyes
met. In the deepening shadows I could see the sad gleam of his
glance. He burst into sobs. It was the most beautiful declaration
of love ever made to me."

"Self-Portrait
in the Dressing-Room Mirror," oil on board, 81 by 67 centimeters,
1923-4, Collection of Dian Woodner and Andrea Woodner, New York.

One of the
finest works in the exhibition is "Self-Portrait in the Dressing-Room
Mirror," a 1923-4 oil on board in the collection of Dian
Woodner and Andrea Woodner of New York. The dressing room is covered
with reproductions of works important to the artist as well as
some of his own. The artist's pose implies vigor but his posture
shows age and his visage is rather puzzled. Has he stopped to
focus on one of the hanging pictures and been flooded with memories
or thoughts, or is he experiencing pangs of anxiety, or merely
nostaglia?

Vuillard's art is voluptuous and poetic. Although many of his
works are conservative subjects, upper middle-class people at
ease in their well-appointed surroundings, their sense of serenity
and security do not always becalm underlying mysteries and from
some of his small works we see that he was a passionate man of
emotions. The back cover of the catalogue for this exhibition
has the following quotation from Vuillard:

"Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without
a poetic aim. There is a species of emtion particular to painting.
There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of
colours, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the
music of painting."